Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 11

Hi folks,

Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

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Gold funneling

We're aiming to have a nerf to mid/jungle gold funneling in 8.14. It's an issue we've been looking at for a little while now, given it creates lanes without much interaction and putting two income streams on one champion produces a range of balance issues. We haven't been able to find a fix that's low enough on collateral damage to regular jungle play, low enough on disruption for a regular patch and that meets our design values, especially on things like intuitiveness and clarity.

We're at the point though where we don't think we should let the issue persist while we continue to work on those constraints. We'll be going with a temporary solution as a result that's pretty ugly on the intuitiveness/clarity side, with the intention of replacing it come preseason when it's more appropriate to make larger changes. That temporary solution is heavily reduced gold from lane minions if you have a T1 or T2 jungle item and have the most gold on your team.

We're targeting gold on the champ being funneled to here because that's where the biggest discrepancy lies, with that champ having around 50% more gold at the 15 minute mark than the opposing mid laner. We also took a look at solutions that involved hitting XP instead, difference there's much smaller most of the time though (~10%). We considered nerfs to the support items too, to hit the other side of the equation, but conclusion was that wouldn't actually address the issue, given how impactful the gold lead on the champ funneled to would still be regardless. A penalty to lane gold when ahead by contrast is, despite being rather ugly and heavy handed, targeted directly at both funneling and the resource (gold) that's causing the problems. From internal testing so far affect on junglers who aren't funneling's been very small to non existent.

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Nerfing Conqueror

We're planning on nerfing Conqueror somewhat. That probably happens in 8.15, though there's a slim change it slips into 8.14 still depending on how work this week goes. Details at time of writing still to be determined. One of our primary goals though is to get tanks back into a more appropriate spot, with things having swung too hard against them. Doing so initially by looking at systemic things like Conqueror that affect all of them, before getting into individual champion changes.

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Runes selection UI

Not sure yet exactly when, but at some point after the cursor changes are out we'll be doing some work on the runes selection UI. At a minimum that will involve looking at which rune gets replaced when you're trying to change your secondaries. Might also do some work on things like color coding of rune trees, not sure yet. Possible it takes a while to happen, given we've got a few other projects also on the team doing that stuff, definitely planning to do so though.

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Non LoL: Game Design Links

For anyone interested in discussions around game design and development processes the site below's worth a read. Covers some useful topics in pretty clear and concise way. Linked pages are the ones that particularly leapt out to me, many of the other sections are good too though:

Iterative approach: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-4-dot-0-science-of-design?module_item_id=44537

Prototyping: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-5-dot-1-prototyping?module_item_id=44546

Decision Making: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-6-dot-1-tips-on-decision-making

Different kinds of fun: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-7-dot-0-kinds-of-fun?module_item_id=44563

Different types of player: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/3/pages/level-7-dot-3-player-types?module_item_id=44566

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png